Beach House

There are some projects that I need to do around the house. I am totally motivated by a new blog I started reading called Houzz Eye Candy or something cute like that and she's got this Just Beachy themed way of decorating. I love a beach house. We were within inches of buying a beach house at the end of the summer in our beloved Scituate, MA. We had looked at a house 15 years ago on a marsh, with distant,  but unobstructed water views, but it was just out of our budget. It was the first home we looked at and it was perfect. Open floor plan, 3 bedroom,  2 bath ranch with a deck on the back. But it sold and we always kind of considered it "our house", the one that got away.

We ended up buying a much cheaper (I can't even say more affordable because we had to put so much cash into it to make it livible) little cottage that became our first real home. It was .4 miles from the beach, .2 miles from the harbor and a half mile from the downtown. We put in a new Home Depot kitchen, painted the walls a sunny yellow and tiled the kitchen floor ourselves. The best thing about that kitchen was that there was a washer and dryer at the end of the counter. We took out a partial wall in the tiny living/dining area and made more of a great room, if 11x16 can be considered great. We painted it a soothing green "Blarney Bridge" and painted all the trim white. You walk in the front door, BAM! you are in the living room. We had to keep Tom's chest of drawers in the living room as an accent piece because the tiny stairs were too narrow to carry it up. Upstairs was our bedroom. I almost called the master, but had to stop myself. Our queen bed and a tall dresser that I purchased and stained from the unfinished furniture store were all that fit. I constantly had a bruise on my outer thigh from walking into the sleigh bed on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. My dresser was stored in my in-laws garage. You had to pass through our bedroom to use the only full bath in the house, which had a funny little window that sat halfway in the shower. And completing the floor plan was a smallish guest room with a closet that was built in the wall measuring about 3x3 feet square.  The entire place measured 800 square feet. Eventually my husband built a deck outside, giving us a little more space when the weather was nice. But it was all ours. I loved our house and our pretty little beach town. I loved to walk into town on the weekends and walk in the little boutiques and shops, and then we would eat out on the patio at TK O'Malley's, always getting the steak tips sandwich or the buffalo chicken watching the sailboats and fishing boats go by.

But I was always looking elsewhere. I was forever a "grass is always greener" person. My family is in New York, Tom's was in Connecticut. What about Westchester? How about Fairfield? Maybe we should move back to DC? I was never content to just enjoy what I had. I would get angry at Tom for not giving into my constant barrage of requests to move elsewhere. He loved it there. He is an extremely positive person, who makes the best of wherever he is. But he truly loved it in Scituate. And still I pushed. Eventually a job opportunity came up for us in central Connecticut. We were interested, slightly reluctant to leave, but also excited for a new opportunity. So after only 3 and a half years in our little home, we were moving, to start over closer to family, but still not close enough for a casual visit. We love it here now, and this is most likely going to be our forever home, although it's not the first house we bought when we moved here. It's what our realtor called an old lady special. It needed tons of work that we've been doing a little at a time. If we bought that house, we'd be house-poor in every way possible. Stretched too thin to enjoy either one. Or buy groceries for that matter. It's time for me to settle in and make this my Beach House in the middle of Connecticut, 80 miles from the closest beach.